XLIIIRD AICA CONGRESS AICA 1949 -2009
Dublin Castle, DUBLIN, IRELAND
25TH-31ST OCTOBER, 2009
The Relations between Art and Science:  complicity, criticality, knowledge

Monday 26th October
10.30 Suzanne Anker – keynote speaker Bio art
Suzanne Anker she is a visual artist and theorist working at the intersection of art and the biological sciences. Recent exhibitions, all in 2009 include The Hothouse Archives, Institute for Critical Inquiry, Berlin; The Glass Veil, Berliner Medzinhistorisches Museum der Charite, Berlin, Corpus Extremus, Exit Art, NYC, A New Kind of Art, large-scale installation at the Lisbon Biennale. New publications include Visual Culture and Bioscience, Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, UMBC (2009) in conjunction with the National Academy of Science, “Cultural Imaginaries and Laboratories of the Real: Representing the Genetic Sciences” in The Handbook of Genetics and Society: Mapping the New Genomic Era, (2009) Paul Atkinson, Peter Glasner and Margaret Lock (eds) Routledge. She has recently lectured on her work at the London School of Economics, Cambridge University, Courtauld Institute of Art, all in the UK, in addition to the Banff Center for the Arts in Canada and the Pera Museum in Istanbul. Her radio program The Bio-Blurb show is archived on ArtonAir.org., (formerly WPS1.org) directed …

Photographys Wake (Beginning with Barthes, at the end)  William Messer
[Good afternoon. Im William Messer, an artist, critic, curator and educator with specialization in camera-based art. The following is a presentation I had hoped to give in Paris in 2006, but medical emergencies prevented writing it then; I am pleased to be able to present it here in Dublin.]
Everything had always pointed to photography. Deep into prehistory, humans blown negative hand prints and other cave paintings attempted to fix representative images of themselves and their world. That some of these earliest images are upside down proposes even the possibility that small holes in hides covering cave entrances performed as early camerae obscurae, projecting images of sunlit animals onto the dark walls, providing not only opportunities to try to trace and fix the images, but also communal cinematic experiences. In ancient times and through the Renaissance, painting pushed closer and closer to replication. The formulation of linear perspective, and the imaging assistance of mirrors and lenses, employed in the camera obscura and camera lucida, increasingly enhanced arts verisimilitude. Photography, effectively, existed long before the necessary sciences combined to complete it and fix its images.
170 years and nine months ago, in the midst …

Art and Space: a revolution in knowledge By Susana Sulic
The techno- biological era is just born and two radical revolutions allows us to enlarge the vision of our global world and open the door of a scientific imaginary.
The inner body has been expanded with the lecture of the genetical code as far as the planetary system and further areas of the Cosmos can be raised. We are not only exploring the planetary systhem but also re discovering new planets in the galactic world.
With the haptic uses in telexistent spaces the larger waves of the Cosmic space became “more real” and tangible worlds.
We are stablishing connexions between disciplines such as biotechnologies, physics and artworks located in the abstract space of communication.
Between the avant garde mouvements of the XXth. Century we can mentionned the Futurism, Spatialism, and some kinetical experiences.
We are going to paid spetial attention to the pioneers of art and space ; and the generation of artists that were directly influenced by the shock of the spatial aventure.
I will illustrate the conference with documents, photographic art works and videos of the artists .
(art works and videos are omitted from this presentation)
Spatial adventure in …

In France’s Palace of Versailles, the far north of its gardens is presided over by the Fountain of Neptune, home to, among others, the singular lead sculpture Proteus with a Narwhal.
The singularity of this work by Bouchardon is that it constitutes one of the few existing representations of the sea-god who possesses, according to the Homeric poem, two talents:  prophesy and shape-shifting at will (a marine-terrestrial human figure that becomes lion, panther, boar, dragon, tree, water, fire).
From there arises the centuries-long struggle to artistically represent a theme lacking in precise iconographic identity, and moreover, that abounds in a concept so volatile, yet fleeting, as that of metamorphosis.
Thus, the mythic Proteus, under the sign of morphological mutability, alludes to the unstable and nomadic nature of art in our day; while under the sign of vision for the future, it refers to the society of our time, the realm of incessant scientific and technological advances, among which the proteomics precisely stands out.
During the first decade of the 21st century, the technology-art-society triad has shown a growing preeminence in the artistic practices emerging from the most diverse latitudes of the world.
Abandoned are the formalistic postulates that once advocated for the purity of the …

Arts and Sciences, between the copy and the fiction
As many of us here, I am convinced that the thematic chosen for this congress is welcome and necessary, even if deliberately complex and multiple. It’s tricky and more than obvious to say that relations between arts and sciences did not start today of course. Maybe then it would be more adequate to check which are the directions, solutions, interactions or applications that have been elected for such kind of manifestations, and consequently if these unions, fusions or repulsions have notably contributed to material and critical evolution among creation itself. To put it like this means to implicate an historiographical lecture for this hypothesis, as to oblige oneself to try to define what involves precisely the generic meaning of « sciences » that gathers a good range of interpretations, as contradictory and diverse as what offers, at least, our cultural systems of education and evaluation. As a matter of fact, I suppose that our viewpoints are much more directed towards the so called « exact sciences » in France, i.e. meaning technological discoveries, able to reinforce the contents of art proposals. I might not be the only one here to remember to …

We seem to be having an outbreak of happy collaborations between Art and Science in all sorts of quarters. Science Museums are running exhibitions on the relationship; Art Museums are doing likewise; and one UK Public Art Commission (The Arts Catalyst) is dedicated to it: so much so indeed that we may well need to ask is it not economic ideology which is encouraging the reunification of these domains? In this, it is reasonable to suggest that with the demands of national governments for ‘accountability’ from public bodies, both Science Museums and Art Museums seek to claim a larger swathe of the public as audience, and the formula of linking art (as the affective) and science (as the acquisition of knowledge) appears to fit the bill. This is the sort of populism that governments, certainly in this part of the world, have been pleased to support for quite some time. But the desire to proclaim relations between art and science has started to run deeper into managerial culture, the implications of which we have barely begun to comprehend. Most of you will have encountered in one way or another how the increasing emphasis on the ‘knowledge economy’ is changing our …

Medusae Resignified: Narrative Strategies in Dorothy Cross’ Work
At the begging I will quote few sentences uttered by one of three narrators in the video work Medusae by Dorothy and Tom Cross released in 2003.
The problem with box jellyfish is that they have very complicated eyes, as complicated as our eyes. We wonder then how they’re processing the signals from these eyes, without having a brain. They can see clearly, but then we don’t know what processing power, how big a computer is back there to handle the image, and what they do with it. We know for example that they appear to see dark pier pilings and avoid them, they swim more or less up to a human and swim around it or swim away because it is too big to eat.
It could be possible to say that the video is an outcome of the artistic research of the acclaimed Irish artist Dorothy Cross and the scientific research of her brother, biologist professor Tom Cross, but more important, the narrative structure of Medusae, among others, poses the question of the mere meaning of notions of art and science. The objects of their research and narrative representation are from the one …

XLIIIRD AICA CONGRESS
AICA 1949 -2009
Dublin Castle, DUBLIN, IRELAND
25TH-31ST OCTOBER, 2009
The Relations between Art and Science:  complicity, criticality, knowledge

PROGRAMME OF EVENTS
AICA CONGRESS TIMETABLE
Dublin Castle programmes and associated evening events
Information ; www.aica.ie
Registration ; aica2009@abbey.ie

FINAL RUNNING ORDER FOR PAPERS AT CONGRESS 09
Monday 26th October
10.30 Suzanne Anker – keynote speaker Bio art
Suzanne Anker she is a visual artist and theorist working at the intersection of art and the biological sciences. Recent exhibitions, all in 2009 include The Hothouse Archives, Institute for Critical Inquiry, Berlin; The Glass Veil, Berliner Medzinhistorisches Museum der Charite, Berlin, Corpus Extremus, Exit Art, NYC, A New Kind of Art, large-scale installation at the Lisbon Biennale. New publications include Visual Culture and Bioscience, Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, UMBC (2009) in conjunction with the National Academy of Science, “Cultural Imaginaries and Laboratories of the Real: Representing the Genetic Sciences” in The Handbook of Genetics and Society: Mapping the New Genomic Era, (2009) Paul Atkinson, Peter Glasner and Margaret Lock (eds) Routledge. She has recently lectured on her work at the London School of Economics, Cambridge University, Courtauld Institute of Art, all in the UK, in addition to the Banff Center …

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